Ryan Clark SEC ESPN Miami First Take Screengrab via ESPN
By Matt Yoder on

For the third year in a row, the SEC has failed to produce a team that has qualified for the College Football Playoff. And analysts like Ryan Clark are trying to find ways to describe the new landscape.

The Miami Hurricanes of the forgotten ACC beat the Ole Miss Rebels at the Fiesta Bowl to knock the SEC entirely out of the playoff after another hugely disappointing postseason. It’s been so bad that the conference has lost even their biggest mouthpiece in Paul Finebaum, who has run out of ways to try to defend the league.

But LSU alum Ryan Clark may have found a way to do so on Friday’s episode of First Take after the game. In his comments on Miami’s victory, he labeled the Hurricanes “the most traditionally SEC football team” in the country.

“I know you’re going to hate this,” Clark told Cam Newton and Stephen A. Smith. “The Miami Hurricanes are the most traditionally ‘SEC football team’ in all the country. It ain’t Florida, it ain’t LSU, it ain’t Auburn, it ain’t Alabama, it ain’t Georgia. This is the first time Ole Miss this season has faced a team that plays like we historically believe SEC teams play.”

“The physicality was out the door,” the ESPN analyst added. “3rd and 4th down, 3rd and 2, 4th and 2, what do they do? They turn around and hand the football off to Mark Fletcher, they hand the football off to CharMar Brown. They run downhill and physically dominate Ole Miss. Defensively, they were the faster team, they were the more athletic team, they were the more athletic team. This game is actually way closer on the scoreboard than it was in real life. They dropped four picks. Four of them! Carson Beck throws an interception on a tipped ball in the red zone. This team absolutely dominated from a physicality standpoint, from an athleticism standpoint.”

Given everything we thought we knew about college football over the past generation, the comments make a little bit of sense. If you remember games like the BCS National Championship Game after the 2006 season when a heavily favored Ohio State team was physically demolished by Urban Meyer’s Florida Gators in a 41-14 rout. But that game was almost 20 years ago. The playing field has been leveled for several years now as the competition has caught up.

However, another possibility exists. Maybe the SEC just isn’t that much better than all the other conferences in college football and the narratives are finally catching up with reality. ESPN has the rights to the ACC as well! But you never hear anyone at the network talk about the strength, the depth, or the gauntlet of that league… even though a team that didn’t even make the ACC title game is now playing for a national championship.

The reaction to the comments from Ryan Clark was mostly filled with laughter and memes that the analyst was grasping at straws to still find a way to forward the dying narrative that the SEC is still the gold standard in college football at the expense of everybody else.

Ryan Clark was trying to pay Miami a compliment, but there was probably a better way to do that than by labeling them a hypothetical SEC team. Of course, there’s also the matter that Indiana may even be exponentially more physical and dominant than Miami is, but that won’t be found out until the CFP National Championship Game.

Whoever the real “most SEC football team” is in college football, it’s a weird way to frame a sport that is seeing more balance and parity than ever before. And these comments are a fascinating insight into how ESPN, and people who have touted the SEC, may find a way to rationalize the current shift in power in the sport.

If anything, hopefully it opens up some eyeballs at ESPN and across college football. Miami doesn’t have to be a hypothetical SEC team to win and compete for a national championship. And neither does anybody else.

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